By Graham Norris

Cape Town is facing a ticking timebomb in its housing crisis with its 144 informal settlements.

The city needs to deal much more aggressively and innovatively with the land and housing issue if it is to avert a crisis in the next decade.

Professor Iain Low, an associate professor of architecture at UCT, sounded this warning in a talk to the Society of Architects, Planners, Engineers and Surveyors this week.

Taking a look at the Mother City 10 years after the advent of democracy, he said the Zimbabwe experience had brought the land issue to the fore and that the establishment of the Landless People's Movement before the election in South Africa underlined the urgency of the problem.

"People's movements are governments-in-waiting," said Low. "In 2010 the people from the informal settlements on the Cape Flats could be marching on the city," he said, in reference to the Brazilian urban favellas (informal settlements). He said that local authorities needed to transform and called for new forms of governance or agency.

Not dissimilar to the Rapid Land Development Programme (RLDP) had done in Johannesburg, these had to mediate the public and private sectors as a prerequisite to innovation and sustainable solutions. "In effect they prepare land for 'invasion' or orderly occupation."

Progress was being made in some areas, however, and in the field of hostel upgrading the Western Cape probably led the country, particularly with the proposed upgrade of the settlements between Jo Slovo and the airport through the unusual alliance between local, provincial and national government housing departments. "In South Africa space is the most burdensome legacy of apartheid - there is a national imperative for spatial change."

Low added one of the persistent features of change in built environment in Cape Town has been the "pervasive privatisation of the public domain". The transformation of Transnet's Waterfront property into commercial and elite residential space was a prime example of this, as is Century City. He bemoaned the loss of humane public spaces in the city, a trend which had been aggravated by the introduction of parking into public squares and the loss of ground floor retail space in many buildings to make way for parking garages, especially in Loop Street.

The Golden Acre, built on the site of the original station, was "the ultimate privatisation of the public domain", and he slammed the new convention centre for its mono-functionalism and lack of genuinely accessible interactive public space, describing its Coen Steytler Boulevard elevation as "the new wall of Cape Town". The station deck, said Low, was "the only place where the townships meet the city" and presented an opportunity for a unique "new public realm" for the meeting of the difference that divides our city.

The Lifestyles on Kloof development was singled out for its "thoughtful design". As a commercial development it affords a measured contestation of the usual developer-driven mall scenario. Interpreting the old Cape townhouse typology, its pavement cafes act as traditional urban "stoeps" and encouraged interaction with the public spaces on vibrant Kloof Street without detracting from the building's main function as a commercial development.

Low said that although he had questioned former Cape Town Partnership CEO's Michael Farr's "hype" in promoting the city through the City Improvement District, describing his tactics as "smoke and mirrors", he acknowledged that this process had directly resulted in a wave of investment and development which could regenerate the city.

"The unfortunate aspect of this wave has been the failure of the city council to harness this energy and leverage benefit for the adjacent poorer areas of our city," he said. While the address directly questioned the capacity of local government to transform, it recognised mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo's IDP and Premier Ebrahim Rasool's call for "A home for all". However it presented a genuine challenge to their capacity to deliver quality rather than simply quantity.

The meeting was the fourth and last in a series of talks on South African cities in transformation, which was sponsored by Nedbank Corporate. It was attended by about 200 built environment professionals, developers and property financers.This article was originally published on page 7 of The Cape Argus on June 05, 2004